Bounce Rate:

Bounce rate is the percentage of single-page visits in which the person left your site from the first page they landed on.

This differs from “exit page” which defines the last page a visitor was on when they left the site.

A high bounce rate usually shows that the site entrance pages have no relevance to your visitors. The more interesting and relevant your landing pages are, the more your visitors will remain on your site and convert.

You can minimize bounce rates by customizing your landing pages to the keywords and ads that you run. Landing pages must provide the information your visitor is expecting to see.

<title> tags:

A title tag is the main text that describes an online document. It is the single most important on-page optimization element (behind overall content.)  It’s what you see first in a list of search results.

Optimal Format for the title tag is:

Primary Keyword – Secondary Keyword | Brand Name
or
Brand Name | Primary Keyword and Secondary Keyword

Best practices for length of the title tag is less than 70 characters, as this is the limit Google displays in search results.

<meta description=””> tags:

Meta descriptions are not important to search engine rankings, however, they are extremely important in motivating a visitor to your site to click-through from the search engine result page (SERP).

The meta description should employ the keywords intelligently, but it’s most effective in convincing a visitor to click your link instead of the competition’s.

<meta keyword=””> tags:

This is a place to add keywords and search phrases originally to help search engines know what words are important.  It is no longer used by search engines so its effect is virtually nil.  However, if you already have it, it won’t hurt.

Image <alt=””> tags:

This describes a picture so search engines and text readers used by visually impaired visitors know what it describes.  Search engines don’t see information on graphics.
Image <title=””> tags:

This is different from the site <title> tag described above.  Virtually the same as the image <alt> tag for SEO purposes.

Header tags:

These are code elements (called ‘markup’) that tell your browser how to display text.  Since this text is usually more prominent than normal text, search engines add value to keywords appearing that are formatted with header tags.

Image Compression:

Most image formats make huge files that, if used on a site, cause the page to load very slowly.  Compression reformats the image or graphic to make it a much smaller file with the same appearance.  Two versions of the same photo might be 5,000,000 bytes or 50,000 bytes and display exactly the same.  If a page doesn’t load fast, visitors go to the next site on their list.

Backlinks:

Links from other sites to your site.  If they are from relevant sites they help indexing.  If a lot of relevant sites link to you, that suggests to search engines that a lot of people consider your content useful.

Blog:

Short for “Weblog”.  A site with frequently updated content often with the function of supporting comments from visitors.  Very helpful for SEO although requiring more attention to keep content fresh.

Cookies:

A cookie is a small piece of information stored as a text file on your computer that a web server uses when you browse certain web sites that you’ve visited before. More…

Keyword Density:

This refers to the concept that there is some ideal density of keywords on a page that will control indexing.  While keywords should be used on the page, there is no magic value to density.

Linkfarm:

A site that exists just to create links to sites.  Typically, they may charge a small fee or will gain their revenue from ads on their sites.  Considered ‘spammy’ by search engines.  Avoid using linkfarms.  In fact Google now demotes sites with too many such links.

Organic Search Results:

Organic search results are unpaid, natural listings on search engine results pages (SERPs) that are surfaced and ranked based on their relevance to a user’s query.

Although it takes time and effort to optimize your web pages for organic search, once you rank high in SERPs, you’ll typically see lucrative long term returns on your investment.

PageRank:

This is a value that Google creates based on traffic and relevance and other factors that Google considers important.  The higher the PageRank a site has, the better. Backlinks from sites with high PageRank are valuable for SEO.

SEO:  Search Engine Optimization

Sitemap.xml:

A file placed on the site that advises visiting search engines what pages to index and what their relative importance is.  Very important on sites with frequently update or added information.